Boom Year’s End: As Jamaica’s Hotels Filled and Investors Queued, the Evidence of Coastal Stress Was Piling Up Alongside the Sand

Briefing

• Jamaica was on course for a record 2.4 million-plus stopover arrivals by year-end 2018.
• A new survey documented accelerating erosion along Negril’s Seven Mile Beach.
• Multiple north coast resort approvals were processed in the fourth quarter.
• C-CAM reported funding shortfalls affecting Portland Bight Protected Area patrol operations.
• Coral reef researchers presented updated Caribbean-wide bleaching damage data in November.

The year-end statistics that the Jamaica Tourist Board would compile for 2018 told a story of sustained success: stopover arrivals tracking toward 2.4 million, average length of stay holding steady, visitor expenditure per trip up compared to the previous year. The metrics by which the tourism industry measured itself were uniformly positive, and the investment community that financed resort development read them that way. New room supply was needed; new room supply was being planned, approved, and in several cases built.

Running alongside that story, less prominently but with equal methodological rigour, was a survey of Negril’s Seven Mile Beach published by researchers affiliated with the University of the West Indies. The survey updated earlier studies documenting the beach’s long-term erosion trend — a loss of more than 23 metres of beach width at measured locations since the 1960s, with rates in recent years approaching 1.4 metres annually at the most affected sites. The beach that Jamaica’s most famous resort destination was named for and built around was getting narrower every year. The hotels set back from the original shoreline were finding that the setback was less each season than it had been the season before.

Portland Bight’s Management Challenge

The Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation, which manages the Portland Bight Protected Area, reported in its annual account that funding constraints had limited the patrol and monitoring activity it could conduct over the protected area’s 187,000 hectares during the year. The protected area, which contains Jamaica’s largest remaining mangrove forest and significant sections of reef, seagrass, and coastal wetland, requires sustained active management to prevent illegal fishing, sand extraction, and encroachment on its protected boundaries. Without the staff and fuel to conduct regular patrols, enforcement is nominal rather than real.

The gap between Jamaica’s formal commitment to protected area management — reflected in the Portland Bight designation and the legislation that underpins it — and the resources actually allocated to making that commitment operational was a recurring theme in environmental reporting across the year. Jamaica had, on paper, one of the Caribbean’s more extensive protected area networks. On the water and on the ground, the capacity to manage those areas was chronically underfunded relative to the task.

The Development Queue

The final quarter of 2018 processed a number of planning applications for coastal resort development that had been working their way through the approval system during the year. Parish councils with coastal territory — St Ann, Trelawny, Hanover, Westmoreland — were reviewing applications against planning frameworks that had not been substantially updated in decades. The environmental advocates who appeared at public hearings and submitted comments on EIA documents were working within a system that allocated them a formal voice in the process while building in no obligation to give that voice decisive weight. The approvals, in most cases, proceeded.

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